At this point in the planning stage, define your VA App's business requirements, which VA commonly calls the Business Requirements Document (BRD). The BRD is a stakeholder agreement about the nature of the App's deliverables – the tools the App provides to perform tasks. The better you define the deliverables now, the less trial and error occurs during development and even after release. Break down the deliverables into their discrete tasks. In the MAE JIRA tracking system, these requirements become agile stories and epics, and they are the original material for the App's unit tests, end user instructions, and user acceptance criteria.
The BRD is not required within the Project Management Accountability System (PMAS) so sponsoring VA Offices typically supply a BRD template. You should abide by your VA sponsor's BRD authoring policy.
Within Agile development methodology, these initial requirements are fit into incremental development cycles. This allows for adjusting the deliverables to fit the schedule as the VA App works its way through the development stage. Once in the MAE JIRA system, some Offices can generate the BRD on demand from JIRA filters.
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